The Wages of Guilt

by Ian Buruma

  In 1960, hundreds of thousands demonstrated in Tokyo and other cities against the ratification of a new security pact with the United States. The pact actually reduced American powers in Japan, but it was seen as an example of American intervention nonetheless. People thought, not without reason, that the United States, in collusion with the conservative Japanese elite, was undermining the peace constitution. Ikeda’s predecessor as Prime Minister, Kishi Nobusuke, forced the bill through the Japanese parliament anyway. The public temper became so heated that President Eisenhower was forced to postpone a visit to Japan, even though “patriotic” gangsters had volunteered to guard his route into town.

  The point of all this is that Ikeda’s promise of riches was the final stage of what came to be known as the “reverse course,” the turn away from a leftist, pacifist, neutral Japan—a Japan that would never again be involved in any wars, that would resist any form of imperialism, that had, in short, turned its back for good on its bloody past. The Double Your Incomes policy was a deliberate ploy to draw public attention away from constitutional issues. And so the time of ruins was seen by people on the left as a time of missed chances and betrayal. Far from achieving a pacifist utopia of popular solidarity, they ended up with a country driven by materialism, conservatism, and selective historical amnesia. They also felt, even more than was the case in Germany, a real sense of déjà vu. Prime Minister Kishi had never been an architect, but otherwise his wartime career had been quite similar to Albert Speer’s: Vice-Minister of Industry and Commerce during the 1930s, and Vice-Minister of Munitions during the war. He was arrested as a Class A war criminal but was released in 1948. His political comeback was not really remarkable at all. Very few wartime bureaucrats had been purged. Most ministries remained intact. Instead it was the Communists, who had welcomed the Americans as liberators, who were purged after 1949, the year China was “lost.”

  In June 1951, a West German diplomat returned from Tokyo and wrote the following letter to a Minister for Economic Affairs in Bonn: “All those who were purged from their jobs in 1945–46 for political or other reasons have now resumed their work in complete freedom. In other words, everything in Japan that corresponded to what was done in Germany under the name of denazification has been laid aside. I have absolutely no doubt that in one year we will see a complete change of personnel in Japanese politics. Because of their superior discipline, a large number of our old friends will once again be taking up leading positions.”

  Before this happened, the Communists, and leftists in general, had been the most active advocates of purges themselves: political opponents were quickly branded as war criminals. And the Communists were absolutely opposed to what they called the emperor system. But their own dedication to democracy was not always apparent. Nor did a succession of violent strikes do much for their public image in Japan. Nonetheless, the “red purges” of 1949 and 1950 and the return to power of men whose democratic credentials were not much better helped to turn many potential Japanese friends of the United States into enemies. For the Americans were seen as promoters of the right-wing revival and the crackdown on the left. This is one reason why, of all the historical symbols to haunt future generations, Hiroshima, as an American “war crime,” would be the most powerful.

  Continuity is always a problem after a disastrous regime. An absolutely clean break is impossible. Zero Hour is an illusion. Cultural habits and prejudices, resulting from political propaganda, religion, or whatnot, are never easy to change, particularly when the agents of change are foreign occupiers who might not always know what they are doing. It is easier to change political institutions and hope that habits and prejudices will follow. This, however, was more easily done in Germany than in Japan. For exactly twelve years Germany was in the hands of a criminal regime, a bunch of political gangsters who had started a movement. Removing this regime was half the battle. In Japan there was never a clear break between a fascist and a prefascist past. In fact, Japan was never really a fascist state at all. There was no fascist or National Socialist ruling party, and no Führer either. The closest thing to it would have been the emperor, and whatever else he may have been, he was not a fascist dictator. Many of the men who governed Japan before the war (the war in China as well as the Pacific War) continued to do so during the war, and remained when it was over. These were discreetly autocratic bureaucrats and conservative politicians, none of whom had any of the thuggish swagger of a Göring or a Goebbels. One might say that the armed forces actually ruled Japan, but if so, the question is which armed forces, or even who in the armed forces. The chain of command was by no means clear. So, whereas after the war Germany lost its Nazi leaders, Japan lost only its admirals and generals.

  There had not been a cultural break either in Japan. There were no exiled writers and artists who could return to haunt the consciences of those who had stayed. There was no Japanese Thomas Mann or Alfred Döblin. In Japan, everyone had stayed. Many former leftists officially recanted their political views during the 1930s in a formal manner known as Tenko, literally conversion, only to revert to their Marxism as soon as the war was over. There were writers, such as Nagai Kafu, who were privately appalled about the state of wartime Japan and scoffed in their diaries at the vulgarity of militarism. But “inner emigration” was about as close as any Japanese writer—the odd Communist aside—came to registering any kind of protest.

  Among the many photographs of life in the ruins of Japan, there is one particularly striking picture. It was taken in Tokyo in 1945 by the photographer Kimura Ihei. In the foreground are three people, two women and one man, bowing in the direction of the main gate, or torii, of the Yasukuni Shrine. Between the bowing people and the gate is a wooden sign that says: “Off-Limits to All Allied Personnel and Vehicles.” The occupation authorities had tried to suppress activities at this shrine, where the souls of men and women (mostly men) who had died for the emperor were worshipped. Enshrined here, among the spirits of millions of soldiers who had never asked to die, were the souls of men who had massacred civilians in Nanking and Manila, tortured POWs, and murdered slave workers. Yasukuni was the holiest shrine of the militarized emperor cult.

  In front of the main shrine are two huge bronze lanterns, engraved with the figures of Japanese war heroes and scenes of celebrated battles. In a way that was typical of the American occupation, the shrine’s keepers were ordered to deface the lanterns, even as the main object of their veneration, the emperor himself, was kept in place and carefully protected from historical scrutiny. The Shinto priests dutifully covered the reliefs with cement, which they removed without any problem in 1957. The emperor himself resumed his annual visits to the shrine in 1948, the year Kishi Nobusuke was released from jail. And here they were, this man and two women, in the cold winter of 1945, worshipping the very symbol that had brought them, and millions of others, such grief.

  Yet nothing had stayed entirely the same in Japan. The trouble was that virtually all the changes were made on American orders. This was, of course, the victor’s prerogative, and many changes were beneficial. But the systematic subservience of Japan meant that the country never really grew up. There is a Japanese fixation on America, an obsession which goes deeper, I believe, than German anti-Americanism, which often goes deep enough. Germany was occupied by several powers, including two European ones. Japan was effectively occupied only by the Americans. West Germany was part of NATO and the European Community, and the GDR was in the Soviet empire. Japan’s only formal alliance is with the United States, through a security treaty that many Japanese have opposed. By renouncing national sovereignty, Japan became entirely dependent on the U.S. for its security. So there is still a great deal of unfinished business with the Americans, whose political domination is keenly felt.

  By now, when Japanese talk about the war at all, they usually mean the war against the United States. Many Japanese who had deep reservations about the war in China felt a sense of patriotic pride when Japan attacked the United States in
1941. Guilt about the Nanking Massacre by no means implies a similar feeling of guilt about Pearl Harbor. Whereas the Germans are told over and over to remember the Nazis and the Holocaust, young Japanese think of Hiroshima and Nagasaki—and possibly Nanking, but only when prompted by liberal schoolteachers and journalists. The war in Southeast Asia is hardly remembered at all. Older Japanese do, however, remember the occupation, the first foreign army occupation in their national history. But it was, for the Japanese, a very unusual army. Whereas the Japanese armies in Asia had brought little but death, rape, and destruction, this one came with Glenn Miller music, chewing gum, and lessons in democracy. These blessings left a legacy of gratitude, rivalry, and shame.

  You get an idea of what it must have felt like in fiction. American Hijiki, a novella by Nosaka Akiyuki, is, to my mind, a masterpiece in the short history of Japanese Trümmerliteratur. Nosaka was a teenager when the war ended and so was his main character, an advertising man named Toshio. Toshio’s memories of 1945 are of those chewing-gum papers glittering in the sun, of GIs with big behinds wrapped in tight gabardine trousers, of jeeps with aerials sticking up like fishing rods, of free food and squirts of DDT, of being tipped to provide the foreign soldiers with girls, of saying “San-Q” (thank you) at every opportunity, of parachute drops of crates filled with tea, which the Japanese mistook for seaweed (Hijiki) and ate with astonishment at foreign eating habits. To a Japanese of Toshio’s generation, the total American victory was not just a military disaster, it was a racial humiliation.

  “ ‘Gibu me shigaretto, chocoreto, san-Q. No one who’s had the experience of begging from a soldier could carry on a free-and-easy conversation with an American, I know it. Look at those guys with their monkey faces, and the Americans with their high-bridged noses and deep-set eyes. And now all of a sudden you hear people saying the Japanese have interesting faces, beautiful skin—can they be serious? Often in a beer hall I’ll see a sailor at a nearby table, or some foreigner who seems shabby if you just look at his clothes, but his face is all civilization and I catch myself staring at his three-dimensional features. Compared to the Japanese all around him, he’s a shining star. Look at those muscular arms, the massive chest. How can you not feel ashamed next to him?’ ”

  Toshio’s wife, like many modern Japanese women, is less neurotic about foreigners. She made friends with an American couple on holiday in Hawaii and invited them to Tokyo. The husband, a big, bluff man named Higgins, turns out to have been in Japan before: during the occupation. He even speaks a few words of Japanese. Toshio thinks he ought to find Higgins a girl.

  “ ‘What is it that makes me perform such service for this old man? When I’m around him, what makes me feel that I have to give everything I’ve got to make him happy? He comes from the country that killed my father, but I don’t resent him at all. Far from it, I feel nostalgically close to him. What am I doing when I buy him drinks and women? Trying to cancel out a fourteen-year-old’s terror at the sight of those huge Occupation soldiers? Paying him back for the food they sent when we were so hungry we couldn’t stand it?’ ”

  Toshio hears about a special entertainment, a sex show in which the man with the biggest penis in Japan will perform. This he must show Higgins. For surely this will impress the American guest. And so they gather in a hotel room in Sugamo, very near the place where the leading Japanese war criminals were hanged. Japan’s Number One is about Toshio’s age. His name is Yot-chan. His partner is about twenty-five, and presumably attractive. Still, things do not turn out well. Number One has trouble with his performance, no matter how hard he and the girl try.

  “Before he knew it, Toshio was straining as if he himself had been struck impotent. ‘What the hell are you doing? You’re numbah one, aren’t you? Come on, show this American. That huge thing of yours is the pride of Japan. Knock him out with it! Scare the shit out of him!’ It was a matter of pecker nationalism: his thing had to stand, or it would mean dishonor to the race.”

  But it is all to no avail. Toshio understands the situation perfectly: “ ‘This man they call Yot-chan must be in his mid-thirties, and if so, Higgins might well have been the cause of his sudden impotence. If Yot-chan had the same sort of experience that I did in the Occupation—and he must have, whatever the differences between Tokyo and Osaka-Kobe—if he has memories of “Gibu me chewingamu,” if he can recall being frightened by the soldiers’ huge builds, then it’s no wonder he shriveled up like that.’ ”

  The film director Oshima Nagisa is about the same age as Nosaka and Japan’s Number One. He remembers how hungry the Japanese were after the war for entertainment, anything from the outside world, where people had money, ate plenty of food, and lived in big houses, instead of among the ruins. They wanted to see America, if only in flickering images on a torn and dirty screen. But did these films teach the Japanese democracy? Oshima thinks not. Instead, he believes, Japan learned the values of “progress” and “development.” Japan wanted to be just as rich as America—no, even richer: “And if we think about the extraordinary speed of postwar progress and development in Japan, perhaps we should say that the route upon which we traveled was that Union Pacific railway line which we saw in those Westerns several decades ago.”

  PART TWO

  AUSCHWITZ

  IN AN INTERVIEW with a popular German magazine, the Polish film director Andrzej Wajda made the following statement: “Germany will continue to mean, among many other things, Auschwitz. That is to say: Goethe and genocide, Beethoven and gas chambers, Kant and jackboots. All this belongs indelibly to the German heritage.”

  Many German intellectuals would nod their heads in agreement. Auschwitz is the past that refuses to go away, the dark blot on the national psyche. It is not just a German problem; it is part of Germany itself. The past, wrote the West German historian Christian Meier, is in our bones. “For a nation to appropriate its history,” he argued, “is to look at it through the eyes of identity.” What we have “internalized,” he concluded, is Auschwitz.

  All this rests on the assumption that there is such a thing as a national psyche. And to assume that is to believe in national community as an organic mass with history coursing through its veins. I think it is a romantic assumption, based less on history than on myth; a religious notion, expressed less through scholarship than through monuments, memorials, and historical sites turned into sacred grounds. Auschwitz is such a place, a sacred symbol of identity for Jews, Poles, and perhaps even Germans. The question is what or whom Germans are supposed to identify with.

  Like millions of others—pilgrims, tourists, identity seekers, and the merely curious—I visited Auschwitz, the museum, as well as the remains of the extermination camp of Birkenau. I was there on a warm spring day. Accounts of visits to Auschwitz rarely fail to mention nasty weather: harsh frost, or continuous, depressing drizzle, or sticky heat. But I was there on a perfectly pleasant day. The landscape was neither especially beautiful nor sinister.

  I tried to imagine what it had been like inside those wooden barracks of Birkenau—hundreds of people stuffed into primitive military stables with barely room for forty. I found it impossible. It was like trying to imagine extreme hunger or having your fingernails ripped out. I knew about the suffering, but could not imagine it. The air smelled too clean, the grass outside was too fresh, the wooden bunks, crammed between thin walls—six people to one bunk, with space for two—were too neat. There were no lice, there was no mud, there was no crying, no cursing, above all no fear. (Perhaps that is why lousy weather is a cliché of Auschwitz descriptions; at least you can imagine that.)

  The idea that visiting the relics of history brings the past closer is usually an illusion. The opposite is more often true. The area of the former ghetto in Warsaw was more evocative, to me, than Auschwitz, precisely because there was nothing left. The past had been obliterated. There were new, drab apartment blocks there now and patches of dirty grass. Hidden away in a grimy corner was Natan Rapoport’s monument of the 1943 upri
sing: a bronze sculpture faced with stone blocks. (The blocks, supposed to recall the Western Wall in Jerusalem, had been meant for a different purpose. Hitler had wanted them for a victory monument in Berlin.) Someone had daubed a swastika on the monument. Someone else had tried unsuccessfully to wipe it off. There was a man with vodka on his breath selling maps of the ghetto. He was playing scratchy tunes of Israeli folk songs on a small cassette machine. In this desolation, the imagination was unhindered by relics. This is where it happened. One could imagine that, even if one couldn’t imagine what it had been like.

  Auschwitz, though, with the tourists taking holiday snapshots in front of the iron gate with the famous words “Arbeit Macht Frei” (“Freedom Through Labor”), was different. Here the past had fossilized into something monumental or, as Adorno would have put it, museal. I tried to search for at least a clue of what had happened. Inside those dark barracks of Birkenau, my eyes were drawn to the wooden beams supporting the crudely made roofs. Many of them had proverbs written on them in German, the kind of thing you see on walls of Bavarian farmhouses or old-fashioned beer mugs, often in Gothic script—“Cleanliness is next to godliness”—and so on. I don’t know whether these maxims, to be read by people whose only duty was to die, were meant as a joke. Perhaps not. Perhaps the folkish sentimentality was part of the culture of violence and death. The SS officers liked to hear music—waltzes, tangos, light opera tunes—as they murdered their slaves. The roads to many German concentration camps had signposts with traditionally styled wood carvings, the kind that normally depict fairy-tale characters or forest gnomes. Only, these showed SS men beating bearded Jews.